Gabbard, Inslee, Hickenlooper and Brown (if he were to resurrect his bid for some reason) already have 2 of the 3 polls they need. The fundraising threshold is probably the *easier* way to qualify (65K donors) but polls is pretty easy too. https://bit.ly/2UN80FJ

Did this pretty quickly so don't take as gospel, but it looks to me like 10 candidates have already qualified for the debates under the DNC's *polls* criteria: Biden, Sanders, Harris, O'Rourke, Warren, Booker, Klobuchar, Castro, Gillibrand, Buttigieg.

OK, you guys are pretty smart. It was indeed Buttigieg—who on the one hand is very much in his element among the self-selected audience at a 538 live podcast @ NYU. But on the other hand, we've done quite a few live shows and have not seen many reactions like that. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1108559235259002880

We taped a 538 live podcast at NYU tonight and there was *extremely* raucous applause for one Democratic candidate who is not generally regarded as a frontrunner when he/she was chosen in our candidate draft. Can you guess who?

love this from @NateSilver538 on facebook. I think it reflects why they get hammered by the press: FB inadvertently gives voice to people who editors systematically shunned. Many critics want FB to be more like left-leaning editors, and that provokes regulation from GOP lawmakers https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1108001116984360962

I don't have strong opinions about casinos as a source of state revenue, but it would be awesome to have a place with (legal) live poker in or near the 5 boroughs. https://twitter.com/NYTMetro/status/1108445002441609222

This is a weird one
(1) Very interesting for Bernie to be running on electability
(2) I guess we're going to have to live with candidates cherry-picking polls on Twitter, but oddly,
(3) A lot of polls that show Bernie much *further* ahead of Trump, although some are out-of-date https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1108436403841576960

There are several different stories you could tell from this data and I'm not sure which one is right. Media coverage quite closely correlates with polls, as well as other measures of candidate viability (e.g. fundraising), although it's very hard to distinguish cause and effect.

With Mike Gravel (!!) having formed an exploratory committee, Wikipedia now lists 18 current or former (Ojeda) "major" Democratic candidates for president, which would break the record of 17 candidates (GOP, 2016), although "major" is a debatable term in several cases.

To be less glib, Bernie needs communications staff who understand how to build bridges to the rest of the D Party instead of just preaching to the converted. As long as they're good at that, their personal views (from being hired guns to true-blue believers) are kinda irrelevant.

Pundits who are implying that eliminating the Electoral College is some sort of radical position should check the polls. Most people support a Constitutional amendment to change to a popular vote. https://twitter.com/CBSNewsPoll/status/1108409915364773889

"Bernie shouldn't hire people who come across like assholes and reinforce negative stereotypes about Bernie supporters" seems like good advice. It's kinda weird to imply that Bernie shouldn't hire people who strongly/passionately prefer Bernie to other D candidates though.

Beto beat the state-adjusted fundamentals by ~2 points, Klobuchar by ~15 and the Minnesota electorate is much more similar to the key swing states.
Admittedly, he had to face an incumbent and she was up against a nobody. But then again the incumbent was Ted Cruz.

I think treating incumbency as essentially a rounding error is a huge problem. With an incumbency advantage of about ~6 points, that basically wipes out the entire difference between Klob and Beto (since she was an incumbent and he was running *against* an incumbent).

Also this. For various reasons—the economy is already good, he doesn't seem to be interested in pivoting—I don't think Trump is likely to become significantly more popular (or that he's more popular than polls imply). But it's easy to imagine the Democrat being equally unpopular.

Of course the real reason the Electoral College is good is because it requires people to carefully consider how error & uncertainty are correlated between different states in order to develop well-calibrated probabilistic election forecasts, a vital underpinning of our democracy.

I'm more anti-anti-anti-Electoral College than I am anti-Electoral College. The arguments that usually-smart people make to defend are often poor to the point where they persuade me against their position vs. if they'd said nothing at all.

Sure (B) is better than (A). But maybe being 3/4 of the way to (B)—"here are my principles and priors but we'll fill out some details as we learn more, including about political constraints"—is also better than (B). It's what most people would do when taking e.g. a new CEO job.

There's also a lot of middle ground between (A) "empty vessel" and (B) "must issue at least two dozen 60-page white papers on the major issues of the day before setting foot in Iowa and New Hampshire".

The narrative that Beto has never taken any substantive policy positions is…pretty wrong. He said quite a bit about the issues in his run for Senate last year. He was also in Congress for 6 years and voted on a lot of stuff. https://53eig.ht/2OfgH9n

I don't have super strong feelings about the order of the 4. It's not easy to compare Bernie and Harris, for instance.
Harris and Beto are easier to compare, and I think I'd take Harris's broader coalition and head start in staffing over Beto's edge in $$ and media attention.

Lukewarm take: the conventional wisdom is right that Biden, Bernie, Harris, Beto are the 4 candidates most likely to win the Democratic nomination in some order. https://twitter.com/pollreport/status/1108096384706600960

huh, @AndrewYangVFA may have discovered that theres a latent demographic of voters that is passionate about science & data-driven policy. I see folks like @NateSilver538 and economists enthusiastic about his platform. And his “math” hat just sold out. This is so so fascinating https://twitter.com/andrewyangvfa/status/1108024089040613377

You're confusing him with Tim Salmon. Mike Trout is real, Tim Salmon is the knock-off version for developers who didn't pay for the MLBPA license. https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1108012176571330562

Something related to think about: the sum total of all *curated* news content on the Internet (i.e. anything that goes through human editors) likely leans center-left, since that reflects the median proclivities of the editors at major publications as well as their readers.

Facebook picks up on the shadow/residual of whatever content there's latent demand for, but which isn't promoted by curators/editors. That means some on the left, but more on the right—especially the far right. Also, lots of sensational content that editors would tamp down.

Facebook's audience evolved from being pretty left-leaning in 2012 to more or less down the middle in 2016. Not unreasonable to assume it will be right-leaning by 2020, especially for news, as right-leaning content has been overperforming there since last algorithm tweaks. https://twitter.com/axios/status/1107952353108324353

Another way to frame it: Beto's positions—and he's articulated more positions than you might think—are decidedly liberal rather than left, but also liberal rather than centrist or moderate. That probably also describes the median Democratic primary voter fairly well.